Development Diary #20
A Magical Crest for the Te'Kesh
The Te'Kesh Crest is complete! Imbued with arcane power, the Te'Kesh crest shows off their menacing power, enjoy.
A Fiendish Face
The focus on this crest originally was the structural elements associated with the Te'Kesh. Early sketches of the Te'Kesh crest featured a pyramid and the ring structures the Te'Kesh use to pull arcane power from the environment. The only problem to this, which was pointed out to me, is it made the Te'Kesh crest feel the most abstract from the bunch. There is nothing wrong with any of the crests being abstract, but without even thinking about it, I made each crest with a symbolic head of each kingdom the focal point. Therefore, to have the Te'Kesh be the exception made it feel out of place. So it got a menacing head of a Te'Kesh put on it along with some changes to the concept of the crest.
A Focus on the Arcane
The Te'Kesh are heavy magic users, more so than the fire-wielding Kravix, and I wanted to highlight that in the crest. The crest features a spell book, a symbol of magic, and all the pink arcane flair associated with the Te'Kesh. I wanted to make it clear to players who looked at the crest to understand immediately that this kingdom liked its magic.
Commanding a Color Palette
When working with other artists, one of the things I keep hammering away at is the Te'Kesh color palette. The card faces and color schemes of the graphic design elements were chosen very specifically, and it is important to me that the art inside the frames is cohesive to all the other graphical elements in the game. A Te'Kesh for example will never use a green color scheme as that is reserved for the Xizeks. This makes things visually easy to understand for players. If a player sees something orange, pink, and purple, they understand without knowing much detail that the card or element has belongs to the Te'Kesh. There is wiggle room on this for future sets, but until people know what these kingdoms are and what they stand for, the more unified they seem from out the gate the better.
A Kingdom with a Troubled Present
The Te'Kesh were always a troubled ally when the kingdoms were united under Crystalynn rule. They enslave the Donkoree, use oppressive magic, and are isolationist and xenophobic. The Crystalynns chose to ignore these things as the Te'Kesh were able to stabilize the most volatile Lyonaster in their realm. The chains in the crest are reference to their troubled practice with the Donkoree. Though the hero Brava is a foil to everything that is wrong with the current Te'Kesh culture, I would be remiss to not acknowledge that it is still there. This is something I will talk about in a future post, but I am happy with the way the crest came out and really excited to start the Kravix crest and wrap them all up.